From: Sergejus Tarasovas
Message: 11315
Date: 2001-11-20
-----Original Message-----
From: george knysh [mailto:gknysh@...]
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 3:24 PM
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [tied] Old Rus' of the many "nationes"
--- Sergejus Tarasovas <S.Tarasovas@...>
wrote:
two messages which I unfortunately could not decipher.
Would it be possible to repost them? GK
[Sergejus Tarasovas] I UNICODed the text trying to avoid ugly substitutions like {s^}, {e,}, {U} etc. here's a an ASCII-version of the two messages:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Actually, let me take you up on your offer right away.
To clear up something I already mentioned in passing.
Ukrainians have two special "poetic" names for their
Dnipro: SLAVUTA and SLAVUTYCH (sometimes the spelling
is not SLA- but SLO-). Is this not related to Baltic
roots having to do with flowing streams or rivers, and
if so, could it not represent an early name for the
Dnipro in its Proto-Baltic, subsequently Slavicized
area? All the major analyses of "DNIPRO" "DNEPR" seem
to agree that it is a complex form of the river+river
type, with one name (BORIS- going back to the Gr
witness) representing a "Thracian" name and -THENES an
Iranic one (specifically pronounced). But since
Proto-Balts lived along the river for quite a distance
they surely would have had a name for it also. What do
you think?*****
[Sergejus Tarasovas] (The message is uncompromisingly UNICODed in UTF-7, a font like Lucida Sans Unicode is needed. If you have trouble reading it, please let me know and I'll re-post) The absence of any direct traces of such a Baltic name for the Dnieper is a problem not solved in today's Baltistics. Until now I have been aware of the two speculations (both being rather shaky, IMO) mentioned in one of my recent messages: 1. the name was *Ne`munas (> Lith. Ne~munas, Belarusian N'oman 'Nemen'), later re-applied to today's Neman 2. the name was *Duna:j-, since an abstract river is often called Duno~jus, Dunoje~lis etc in Lithuanian folklore, but the Danube flows rather far from today's Lithuania and such a close attention asks for its explanation.
I was aware of the Old... uhm... East Slavic alternative name (along with more usual DUne^prU) for the Dnieper, Slovutic^I < *Slovo,tic^I, since it's mentioned in Slovo o PUlku Igoreve^, but wasn't aware of the form Slavuta < *Slovuta <*Slovo,ta and didn't know they both have survived in Ukrainian (the forms with -a- seem to be of bookish origin, obviously influenced by such Ukraino-Russian Church Slavonic spellings as slavjane^ ).The idea of *Slovo,ta being a Slavic rendering of the originally Baltic name is ingenious, and * S'law-ant-a: 'flowing, washing (its banks)' (participle) as a possible Baltic prototype is not only formally impeccable as to its structure, but also is continued in an existant hydronym - cf. Lith. river-name S^lavanta` .
The only minor problem with this attractive hypothesis would be the fact that such hydronyms as Slovuta or Sluja (Smolensk district, < Balto-Slavic *S'lawja: ) well may be properly Slavic, continuing the same verbal root *s'lew-/*slow- 'flow, wash' or probably even *s'low -/s'lu: - 'be famous', cf. Slavic *slyti/slovo, 'be famous/am famous'. It's sometimes hard to distinguish something proper Baltic from proper Slavic.While we're on that... There's a Lithuanian river S^lave.~ (<*S'lawja: , thus a direct counterpart of Russian Sluja ) with a village Šlave.'nai on its banks, the latter being a formally nearly impeccable (except its acute accent, a circumflex would probably be nicer) direct counterpart of Slavic self-designation *Slove^ne^.Sergei---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*****GK: An additional complication here is the fact
that while in the south, Slavic groups and ethna (I
use the term "nationes" in my writings for entities
such as the Sivera/Siverjany et sim. ["nations of the
mediaeval type"] were relatively cohesive as to
contact and contiguity in rural areas (the steppe
populations were largely a border phenomenon)further
north there were certainly large and as yet
unintegrated groups of Balts and Ugro-Finns living
amongst the (not always) majority Slavic population.
While this left little trace in the extant written
literature such as it was, the influence on daily
speech would have been more pronounced.
[Sergejus Tarasovas]Agree. The question is since what time the consequences of this influence let us state Old Ukrainian, Old Belarusian and Old Russian have alredy emerged, replacing earlier dialectal bunches.
*****GK: I'm not sure which is correct. I suspect,
however, that "national" (in the mediaeval
sense)consciousness in these groups was to a very
large degree independent of language (an excellent
example is 12th c. Suzdalia), and I would be more
inclined to favour solutions which emphasize diversity
over unity, esp. at the level of colloquial everyday
speech.****
[Sergejus Tarasovas] Yes, that's why my doubts concerned not ethnpolitical, but rather _linguistic_ reality of Old Ukrainian etc _languages_ at the time in question.
****GK Whatever the linguists have to say on this, it
is clear to me as a historian that these "nationes"
had political affinities different than the groupings
enumerated above, and I feel certain that these must
have had an increasing influence on their speech.Thus:
the Dregovichi (especially their northern areas) began
to integrate with the Western Krivichi (also known as
the Polochane) rather early (and particularly after
the rule of the Iziaslavichi began in Polotsk: this
branch did not even share in the making of the "Rus'ka
Pravda"). The Eastern Kryvychi were actively
colonizing Meryaland after 1058.
[Sergejus Tarasovas]Agree, see above.There is one group of
Kryvychi which was dominant in the Pskov area. I
remember that this dialect shared some features with
West Slavic (the only thing that comes to mind at the
moment is that "milk" here was "mleko" as in Poland
rather than the full-voiced "moloko").
[Sergejus Tarasovas] Despite that Zaliznyak, being #1 researcher of the Krivichian, has emphasized some Krivichian-West Slavic connections, the evidence he provides in his works doesn't demonstrate anything especially West Slavic . As for that specific exmple, Krivichian indeed seems to avoid /l/-velarisation, pertinent to the Standard East Slavic (aka Old Russian) and reflexes Slavic *CelC as * IlI [yer' - l'udi - yer'] or *elI [l'udi - yer'] (instead of SES *olo), the feature that I can hardly classify as characteristically West Slavic. Since graphemes {е} and {I} (yer') are mutually interchangable in early birch bark inscriptions, { mleko } could well be an occasinalism instead of mIlIko}. I'll check that later, but at any rate the Krivichians formed an obviously separate _linguistic_ unit.
I think I have
solved the issue of the "Ulichi" and "Tivertsi" (wrote
a special article about this in 1997).
The "Polany"[an
artificial literary name for the Central "natio" of
Old Rus' concocted in the 11th c.]were politically
very close to the Derevlany since the time of Yaropolk
Sviatoslavych (+978).
[Sergejus Tarasovas]
Very interesting (both "Ulichi" and "Tivertsi" and especially "Pol'ane's" artificiality - never heard of that).
****GK: Certainly not according to the linguistic
groupings mentioned above. But politically there were
"nationes" which became the nuclei of the later
nations.
[Sergejus Tarasovas] Agree, but see above :)
Sergei